


Atlas (an approach through division)

by ConcerningConstellations



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angela "Mercy" Ziegler-centric, Angela & Jesse, Angela and Genji are more alike than they think, Angela is trying her best, Angela is trying too hard, Anger, Angst, Character Study, Existentialism, F/M, Feels, Fluff, Forgiveness, Friendship/Love, Gen, Genji needs some love, God Complex, Hurt, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, Isolation, Love/Hate, Mom Ana Amari, Recovery, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, angela needs a hug, are BROS, not meant to be romantic but can be interpreted that way, prose, symbolism? in this house? its more likely than you think, vent - Freeform, warning these long winding paragraphs are either really pretty or really fucking annoying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-15
Updated: 2019-04-15
Packaged: 2020-01-13 16:54:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18473143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ConcerningConstellations/pseuds/ConcerningConstellations
Summary: “I sell you no phony forgiveness— I’m a desperate man.”-Ralph Ellison-He doesn’t know how to do this. He is cold and hard. Made for war, not for weeping. But he needs to believe otherwise; needs to know there is something still inside of him that was human, that could break, that could be reduced to skin and bone and salt, ashes, embers. He wanted to know there was something in him that could still be damaged. That could still bleed.(That could still grow back.)“You are not worthy of condemnation, Angela,” promised the man made of metal, and flesh, and miracles. It was the first time he called her by that name. The taste of it lingered in his mouth.-(OR: Angela is hurt, and Genji knows.)





	Atlas (an approach through division)

**Author's Note:**

> so, surprise: i'm still not dead!  
> this has been sitting on my computer for six months. figured it might be better off here.  
> this piece was never really meant to have an audience, but i still hope at least someone out there can detangle these self-indulgent paragraphs into something enjoyable.

 

From the moment he had entered the room— sat still and poised on that cot, allowed her closer to fuss over the wires, the switchboards, the fuses— he had known.

 

In part, he couldn't help noticing. Over the last few months, he had become the silent observer, a creature stuck tight in its shell, a trap of gears and second-hand skin. He had withdrawn, peered through eyes that were only half his and watched the world spin on, disinterested, too bitter to participate. It was easier, these days, to observe— to remain detached. 

 

But it was becoming difficult. 

 

He could see it when she bent closer, eyes narrowed and searching as her fingers worked to untangle the tubes that ran down his arms, knotted from training with Reyes and McCree. She straddles a stool on wheels and takes her time with him, gently dealing with the wires, her breathing shallow and soundless, her chest barely rising. There were circles under her eyes, dark like charcoal, too dark for the concealer to hide away, and he wonders, without meaning to, how long it's been since she's slept. 

 

She acts lovely, though. Sunny as always. She had welcomed him in with a smile and a handshake, small talk, niceties, and he had only nodded, sat down, never once opening his mouth. She took this too in stride, promised to have him finished and recalibrated within the half hour, that she would make sure nothing hurt too badly, that the wire wouldn't come loose again. 

 

Never once had she complained, put him to the side. Even during the bad days— those early weeks where the taste of metal in his mouth was not yet familiar, where he had tried to pry his body out of the cage she built around it, tried to self destruct, screamed curses at her as she and the others sedated him back to unconsciousness— even at his worst, she was there. Dependable. Solid ground stable enough to take the weight of his anger, if not at her, then at everything. No matter what brings him here— accidents in the sparring ring or in the field, annual look-overs, malfunctions he didn’t know how to deal with— no matter how he ended up sitting on her cot, no matter how late he came and left, she was always restless to help, setting aside whatever she was working on without a word of protest, not minding as he watched her, wordless, still grasping for his resentment.

 

He had wanted to resent her. And he tried, sure. But he had realized quickly they had made her as much of a weapon as they made him, given her scalpels instead of swords, syringes and test-tubes and a lab large enough to drown in, and he realized that they weren't as different as he had hoped, he and her; realized that this wasn't nearly so simple.

 

She hissed when some stray wiring caught her off guard, burned the tips of her fingers.

 

“Sorry,” she offered, not looking up at him, shaking out the hand. “It's a bit— temperamental.”

 

He nodded. It didn't hurt him— these days, few things could. She expected his silence, moved on, and again he found himself painfully aware of it; of her. Something about how she held herself was off, a few degrees away from its proper axis. He watched her and found himself studying the arch of her spine, the tilt of her chin, the way she seemed to be leaning slightly to the side. She bent closer, drew her lips into a wince but put no sound behind it. 

 

He feels his mouth open, close, clinch tight. The question he almost asked dies in his throat, and he thinks it’s for the best, thinks that it’s none of his business.

 

“Tell Gabriel to go easy on you for a day, preferably two.” She closed the panel on his arm, began screwing it shut. She used her left hand— he tries not to notice, tries not to care.

  
His voice, still unfamiliar, gritty and mechanic, echos strangely in the walls of the clinic. “Understood.”

 

The doctor wheels away in her seat and grabs a clipboard, reaches for her glasses and goes to slip them over her nose. The motion is imperfect— the frames nearly slip from her fingers, though he doubts anyone who wasn’t looking so closely would notice. 

 

“Have you been sleeping?” she asks, staring down at the clipboard. 

 

He shrugs. “Some.”

 

“Still having difficulties?”

 

“Some, yes.”

 

She scrawls something down. He watches her hand move, watches the joints and ligaments become pronounced against the skin, blue veins apparent on the undersides of her wrists. His own fingers twitch; the veins of tech inch under his knuckles.

 

“The pills haven’t worked?”

 

His lips twist, and he cannot help the low growl that plays behind his words. “I do not tire, doctor, and your medication cannot change that.”

 

It is her turn to go quiet. She looks up half way from her papers and hesitates, picking mentally at the words. He knows that she wants to make it better— wants to say something that would make this seem bearable for him, wants to make him smile, wants to have some sort of evidence that she had not burned away all of Genji Shimada when she helped turn him into something worse.

 

But he is not kind enough to gift her that. And she knows.

 

“Please let me know if there’s anything else I can do for you,” she says, still not looking at him.

 

He rises, motors running, rotating his arm in its socket as the sensors came back online. The doctor turns again to her clipboard, pages of numbers and grayscaled charts that she only pretends to read, gaze blank and unsteady. The pencil in her grasp doesn’t move, and neither does she.

 

Without a word, Genji goes.

 

* * *

 

She is patching up Jesse, her hands dotting over the flesh and metal mesh at his elbow, lips upturned like they usually are when she is alone with the cowboy. He slips out a joke between small winces and childish groans, and she shakes her head and shushes him with a flash of teeth and wrinkled eyes, ducked right beside him, the sunset coming in from the window and slanting down her back.

 

“Couldn't get the damn thing off m’self,” he admits with a light huff, still bearing that sly coyote grin, as if the weakness was merely an ache and he was big enough now to rise above it. Though Genji, who was bunked next door to the man, knew the truth: that since McCree had caught the bullet in the arm just last month the man had called out in his sleep, cursed quietly at nothing when he forgot others were around to hear, stared at his own shadow as if it were no longer all the way his— as if one day, he would look back and find it had deserted him.

 

“You’ve been rough on it,” the doctor says quietly, easing the machinery away from him with a twist and a tug. The wires came loose. McCree sighed as it happened, the stump of his elbow red and freshly stitched. “If you’re not ready for the nanotech, Jess, I can—“

 

“No,” he demands, not at her but himself, his eyes trailing the where his arm should have been— his real arm, flesh and blood and bone. “No, s’alright. Just adjusting, you know. Just— a step at a’time.”

 

And the doctor looks at him through strands of hair that had come loose and curled by her face, that same clipboard resting on her knees, and after a pause that hardly lasted, she put a hand in his. Genji watched as the two sit in silence under white fluorescents, him up on the table and her perched below, looking across the room at nothing, the minutes creeping in as the sun lowered and the light died. 

 

They were not romantic, Reyes had told him. They had come here at the same age in the same boat— too young, raised by war instead of mothers— and when they had found each other, they had latched on. Genji witnessed once as McCree broke a man’s nose over a catcall and some slurred words thrown at the doctor. He recalls that Ziegler did not leave the man’s bedside for days the time he came home from a Blackwatch op with a half-pound of shrapnel in his chest. She had cried that first night when he did not wake up, her surgery gloves red and visible in the waste bin, and Genji, hidden by the door, had left her alone with him; her cries quiet, sharp things, the sound of a knife through thin air.

 

“How long till I’m cleared?” he asks her for what is not the first time.

 

She scoffs, a stiffness in her breath and body. “Six months if I had any say in it.”

 

Jesse chuckles, tilts his head up to look at her. “I know you hate ‘er, but Moira’s smart, Ange. She wouldn’t let me back out there ‘less she thought I could handle it.”

 

_“She’s_ the one who let you lose the arm—”

 

“No one lost my arm ‘cept me,” Jesse interrupts, and it is clear they have had this conversation before. The doctor withdraws, simmers patiently. “Me, and the bastard who aimed the gun. It was a close thing, and it happened, and that’s it, Ange. No use talking, throwing the blame back an’ forth.” 

 

Ziegler nods blankly, slipping her hand out of his. She stands, a motion that is clunky, missing grace. Genji feels an ache where he still has muscles and bones, deep in his chest, the spaces between his vertebrae, pockets of humanity. He does not know why he is here anymore, feet stuck outside the hallway, mouth dry. It had been only hours since she had checked him over, and he could not stop thinking of her— the tremor of her fingers, the strain in her throat.

 

“I know,” she says to him, but there is no closure in the words. She turns and slides vacuum-sealed syringes into the appropriate drawers, closes glass tubes of cotton swabs and bandages. Her back moves beneath the thin fabric of her coat, shoulder blades and bones pressing in and out of view. “But _I_ could have—”

 

“You weren’t there, Ange.”

 

“I should have been,” she reasons, hands on the counter, leaning hard. Jesse stands, leaves his metal arm on the table. He stops behind her and waits, using a voice like nicotine and desert sand, low and calm and burning. Genji feels it reverberate up his metal limbs.

 

“We are not doing this again,” he tells her, carefully.

 

And Ziegler stews in the silence that follows, looking at herself in the reflection of the glass cabinets. It’s hard to see now— McCree is in the way. But she must have nodded, because he shakes his head in turn, as if now the matter was finished, over, done. 

 

“Alright,” he says, a sigh out of his mouth, rubbing his face with his single hand. His stubble needed trimming. It made a noise against his palm. “Listen, I’m turnin’ in.”

 

“Okay,” responds the doctor, immensely interested in the countertop. She tilts her face down and rubs at a stain there. “Let me know if you need help getting that back on.”

 

McCree leans over to grab the mechanical limb, hesitant with his exit. Silently, Genji steps back, turns, ready to make for the corner. 

 

“You know I’m right,” Jesse says, half question, half statement.

 

“Yes.”

 

“S’not Moira’s fault, and it certainly ain’t yours.” 

 

Genji hears footsteps. Glass against thin metal.

 

“I know.” Angela is opening and closing things, organizing, busying her hands.“I know, I’m just— I need to go to bed.”

 

Jesse manages a small laugh, takes another step. “Hell, don’t you always. Let me walk you—”

 

There is a crash, something falling and breaking, a suppressed gasp. Genji feels his skin crawl, bionic flesh shivering and raw at the sound of metal and glass going into fragments, high pitched and jarring. He widens his stance, paralyzed.

 

“Christ,” McCree curses, confused, worked into something anxious and uncertain. “M’sorry— Are you alright? What happened?”

 

Rallying, Genji steps back towards the door, peers through. Ziegler is half slumped over her counter, her breathing pained and measured, face pale. By her feet are the remains of a cylinder full of scalpels, the instruments themselves spread haphazardly over the floor, stainless steal catching the light.

 

“I’m fine,” says the doctor, tight, not looking at him.

 

“I just touched ya,” McCree reasons, drawing closer. His shadow is awkward beneath his feet, strange and distorted, incomplete. “I didn’t shock you, did I? Christ, you’re white as a sheet.”

 

And she is. She removes herself from the counter, manages to straighten, but her form is as rigid as a chest piece, all poise, reduced function. Briefly, she brushes him with a glance that is apprehensive, gauging, his hand hovering close to her as if to help. She waves, a vague signal and tilt of the chin, looking away as if nothing had happened.

 

“No. No, you just— scared me. I pulled an all-nighter yesterday. It’s not your fault.” Then, she separates, creates space between them. It grows as they continue. “It’s nothing.”

 

“I’m sorry,” Jesse says again, clearer, an ache in his mouth. He takes a step closer but makes no real progress. “You look rough. Let me help?”

 

She waves away the words, already turned to the cabinets, where she takes her time pulling out a waste bin from below. Her limbs bump into things they shouldn’t. Her right arm hardly moves at all. “I have it,” she tells him, lukewarm and plain. “I’m alright.”

 

The smile she sends him is small, delicate like the glass at her feet, but somehow honest. Genji watches behind his visor as McCree hesitates, sensing something new in the air, blood and bleach and electricity. He waits for the man to press further, to touch her and lead her to sit, to make sense of her pain— there is _pain_ here, Genji knows, tastes it like ozone on the tongue. End her act. Peel away the layers. Prove her mortality. 

 

But the daft man only stands there, holds out his good hand, lets it fall.

 

“If you’re sure.” 

 

And oh, Genji will hurt him for this later, when training comes around and Reyes turns his back; one gloved fist to the nose, blood on sweat-soaked matting. The simple, trusting bastard.

 

“Of course,” she says, faced away from him, looking down at the glass. “Watch your step.”

 

“Yes ma’am. You get to sleep soon, ’fore Lena pops in and sends straight you out’a your shoes.”

 

“Goodnight, Jess.”

 

McCree makes for the door, mechanical arm tucked under his real one, grabbing his hat from the table and tipping it to her from the threshold. Genji steps back but moves no further, something heavy and irregular throbbing behind his chest plate, his vision stained red from the tint of his visor. He does not know where to go. What to do. Why he came here to begin with. 

 

“G’night, Ange,” the cowboy replied, and then opened the door and stepped out into the hall, the smell of the clinic still clinging to him, cotton balls and antiseptics. The entrance slid shut behind him, and he did a double take upon seeing Genji standing there, blinking a few times before deciding that the light was not playing tricks. He faced him, moving slow.

 

“Oh,” he said, surprised. The shade of his hat cast a line across his face, the light stolen from his eyes. “Shimada— you alright?”

 

Genji was quiet for a long time. He had to sort out his thoughts, limit the words. His exoskeleton felt cold in the dimmed glow of the hall, suddenly out of place, like it was wrong of him to be anywhere but his room and the practice range, a peg that didn’t match the hole. 

 

“I heard a crash,” he says eventually, his voice butchered static. 

 

McCree blinks again, touches his face. “Oh,” he replies, brown eyes moving up and down the hall, the metal limb tight between his arm and waist. “Yeah, no, everyone’s okay. Something just dropped— my fault, honestly.”

 

Genji waits, wanting something more, but Jesse has nothing for him. He opens and closes his hands, listens to the carbon fiber compress and then release, motors turning at intervals. 

 

“The doctor?” he eventually manages.

 

“She’s alright. Needs to go the hell to bed.” McCree turns and stares at the closed door, _Ziegler M.D._ printed neatly there near the handle. There is the sound of glass being collected, faint and dreamy. “She’s alright,” he says again.

 

Genji stares, says nothing, and eventually Jesse leaves him there, waves a goodnight with his good hand from down the hall, his footsteps echoing, then fading. And then the minutes creak by, and he does not move, his resolve slippery, his reason tangled.

 

Why was he here?

 

Genji looks at the door and thinks, but there are no answers. He feels his arm come up, bionic and human and wrong, to touch the door lightly. Behind it there is silence. The occasional exhale and chime of fragments. A wince.

 

For what is not the first time, he wants to hate her. Wants not to give a damn. Wants to be _cold._

 

(That’s not right. That’s not true. He didn’t care what he was, as long as he wasn’t this— stale water, room temperature, something sitting still and noiseless. He wanted to feel rage up his throat, or gentleness down in his fingers, or ambition or spite or forgiveness. He wants to feel anything, save the vague disgust of his own skin, regret mixed with indifference, this thin veil of otherness he has been placed behind. He wanted to own bias, emotion. He wanted it to belong to him. He wanted to _belong.)_

 

He has opened the door without realizing it. The fluorescents are blinding. He squints, makes a small noise in his throat, stands there in the doorway and looks down at where the scalpels were already piled up, the tile white and spotless.

 

She is there on the floor, leaning back against the cabinets, half-crumpled in on herself. One arm grips the other. Her breathing is shallow and soundless, her eyes dazed, teeth set neatly together and clinched behind her lips. The glass is still broken up around her. She had gathered a few pieces together and then left the rest, as if the effort was too much, her motivation too little.

 

When he enters, the doctor flinches, makes herself turn and focus.

 

“—Mr. Shimada.” Her voice catches only once, and immediately, she rallies; schools herself back into position, sitting only slightly straighter and untangling her arms. “I— I’m sorry, it’s a mess in here. Watch your feet, please. Are you alright?”

 

He doesn’t know. He watches as she unfolds slowly, moves to pick up some of the fragments in reach, half-heartily piling them before her. One of her fingers is cut and bleeding. She doesn’t seem to notice.

 

His hands clench and then release all over again, and he is hot, suddenly; impulsive. The door is shut behind him, the air thick and charged, and he knows there is no retreat now, only the follow-through, the risk of whatever whim had led him here tonight. Without a word, he stoops down, bent at the waist and knees, the sound of smooth machinery in motion. He collects the glass carefully, though the pieces could not hurt him. 

 

She watches, weary. “Genji?”

 

“Yes.” He takes his time gathering the splinters, so small he can hardly see them. It is delicate work. Some of the shards break between his fingers, remind him of his strength.

 

“Are you well?”

 

“Yes.”

 

A beat. She is confused, but hides it best she can. “You don’t have to—”

 

“It is easier for me. Safer.” He holds the sharp pieces in both hands, looks at her briefly, studying the pale sheen of her skin. She has begun to stand, a long and uncertain transition from hands and knees to feet, where her frame shakes and then reluctantly holds steady, a red stain on her lab coat.

 

“Oh.” It’s a breath. She turns immediately from him, dumps the few slips of glass she had managed to gather into the waste bin, goes and rests a hand on the countertop. “Thank you.”

 

He nods, though she is not looking. Soon he is finished, and following suit, deposits his pieces into the metal container. They chime against each other, throw specs of light up as they fall. 

 

The two of them stand there, aware of each other, of the inability to breach the gap between them. Genji shifts his weight and stays quiet, and she squirms slowly under his eyes, messes with a stack of papers piled near the cabinetry. She washes her split finger under the sink and presses it into a tissue to stem the bleeding, hardly even looking, already absorbed in the neat paragraphs of text and charts.

 

“I was worried I had wired your arm too tightly, earlier… is that it?” She is already reaching for the screwdriver and latex gloves, collecting it all with one hand. “I’m sorry. I can fix it now.”

 

“No, I—” 

 

But she does not hear him. She takes a step to the side, arm extended towards the glasses she had set above her, the frames smudged and gleaming from their place on the shelf. But the motion goes fuzzy— something is wrong, her balance is lost, muscles refusing to operate in proper order. Something ripples up her spine, then explodes between her shoulders.

 

She hits the ground with a yelp, taking some of the papers with her. Her eyes are dilated. She reaches under one arm, holds her ribs tightly and coughs, face dark and ducked down, half kneeling on the tiles. Suddenly, she is too small, back arching out and then in, tucked against the drawers of her desk. Her lab coat folds over, her shirt riding up.

 

_“Oh,”_ she says from between her teeth, and Genji feels whatever numbness lingering in him dissipate; feels himself enter into his own skin, come awake. 

 

He draws closer, bends down, his hands stopped and hovering in the no man’s land between them.

 

“Dr. Ziegler?” he asks, balancing on the balls of his feet. She shrinks from him, and it stings, but he shoves it all aside. “Are you—”

 

“I— I’m sorry,” she manages, trying to straighten out, failing at every attempt to make this seem less than what it was. Her hand grips her side until every knuckle is white. She does not look at him all the way. “It’s nothing. It’s nothing. A bruise that got the better of me.”

 

A beat, the sour aftertaste of indecision. “Show me,” Genji says eventually, moving his hand close to hers, mere inches away from where a sliver of bare skin was showing just above her hip. It is blotchy, colored black and blue, an ugly mix of tones he is all too familiar with. She notices, goes pale across the face.

 

Immediately, she goes to tug her shirt back down, reach up for the counter, as if wanting to stand. But that same tremor seizes her, sends her deeper into herself, kneeling against the tile with her forehead nearly level with her knees. She gasps, spews German between the exhales.

 

It is bad, Genji thinks. And he, in a way, is worse.

 

“Dr. Ziegler,” he says again, unsure what he was supposed to do next, still shaking and alive inside his body, hands moving back and forth in the space that separated them. “If I may— assist.”

 

The words are off, but he is honest. Gently, he puts one hand on her back, alarmed to find something hard and cool there, a line of metal bending down her spine, two bumps on either shoulder. She gasps, winces. Shakes her head in every direction. 

 

“It’s nothing,” she says again, in that tight, controlled tone. Still, she reaches for his other arm, grips in with one hand, leans hard and needy. “Thank you.”

 

He pulls her up, a painstaking process where she chokes on her own breath, his limbs rotating smoothly as she struggles at his side. She is sweating. Her teeth clench and chatter to keep from making noise. Once she is vertical, he goes blank, walks her to the first place he can think of— the plain cot he had sat on only hours ago, a mattress missing covers. It creaks under her weight, and she stutters out a breath, bends over and holds herself.

 

Genji stands before her, ears ringing from something that was not the nanotech. He feels his tongue sticking to the roof if his mouth, runs it quickly over his lips. Before his eyes, the visor is fogged. He goes to rub it clear but stops halfway through the motion.

 

“If you’d like me to retrieve Amari—“

 

“No,” she interrupts, straightening slightly, face wrinkled with the effort. “It’s— unnecessary. She doesn’t need this on her plate.” 

 

She is aching at every syllable, trying to smile, as if this were some inside joke between them. Her eyes are half-shut, lips pulled thin.

 

“…You are hurt,” he says, a well-known fact, neither an accusation or question. He stares, and she goes still, shakes her head. 

 

“It will heal.”

 

“That was not my meaning.” 

 

He itches behind the mask— his skin rises and crawls, the scar tissue irritated. He is reaching for it before he can even recognize the action, feeling the pad of his fingers against the switch above his jaw, frozen there, aware of her watching. The hesitation is brief. He swallows, presses down, feels the piece of metal come loose, cool air against his face, his vision expanding and going crisp.

 

Now, when he speaks, it is quieter, more like his old self, vocal cords rusted and deep.

 

“Show me,” he says again, setting down the scale of metal, his milky, ruined eyes slowly finding hers.

 

She holds that stare. The seconds go by, the old clock on the wall ticking, the world past the window dark and lonely. Her hand moves from her side to the hem of her shirt, goes still. He can see the veins on the undersides of her wrists, wiry and thin, crooked rivers maneuvering down a pale canvas.

 

The shirt lifts a few inches. He sees that mix of darkened skin, the color of dying flowers, lavender left to shrink in the sun. But then she stops, sucks in a breath.

 

“It happened on assignment,” she tells him, looking down at her hands. She licks her lips, and he understands what is happening, can more clearly see the blockade. Her shoulder was locked into position. The entire left side of her back seemed stiff. “It’s nothing I can’t—”

 

“Stop.” He moves closer, the air cool against his face. She recoils slightly, breathing restricted, but does not protest as his hands brush hers, touching the start of her blouse and bringing it up only an inch, the injury continuing far into the folds. His cheeks sting. He can taste metal and antiseptics, the bitter tang of artificial light. “You will make it worse.”

 

She closes her mouth, nods only once.

 

Genji has done this before, back then, with too many girls to count. But it was different, darker always, a mess of sheets and skin and perfume. It was a rushed exchange of friction and feeling each other raw— not this, something slow and intentional, where he was allowed close to the vulnerability of someone he always doubted could bleed; made privy to the pain. This was a separate motion. Her front stayed covered. He stopped his hands when it was time, trained his eyes hard and ruthless, let it all sink in.

 

The bruise went up from her side to the flat of her back, painted muddy storm clouds on her left shoulder, a scattered mosaic of scabs and thin white scratches. Shrapnel, entry and exit wounds. He could see them like deformed constellations going across the delicate rises and falls of her ribs, risen subtly against the skin, the color of pearls. This was not all that took him by surprise— from the nape of her neck extended a line of silver, a metal snake that tapered off and stopped midway down her spine, a manmade vertebrae thinner and more sylphlike than his own. At her shoulder blades were ports of the same nature, no bigger than the palm of his hands, polished clean and popping loud against the bruises. 

 

Despite himself, he stared. The doctor inhaled as the cool air hit her, neck bent forward, eyes shut.

 

He should be saying something. Words should be in the air. He should call for Amari, or O’Deorain, or Morrison—

 

“The nanites are just being slow,” Ziegler says, her voice changed somehow, pitched thin and wrong. “It’s already started to heal. This time tomorrow inflammation should be down by forty-percent, if I did the numbers correct—”

 

“You…” It’s all tangled in his mouth, like fishing line and barbed wire. His throat is full of cotton. He says what he can manage, but it’s not enough; not the words he intended, the emotion he was after. “You’re like me.”

 

She did not expect this. Her eyes open, blinks of blue, glacier fields and stained glass windows. When she breathes her ribs are apparent, her spine pronounced. He can feel the heat of the wound; his hands are still there, keeping up her coat and blouse, paralyzed like a creature staring into headlights.

 

“Hardly,” she whispers. “It’s not for strength, so as much reinforcement. An extension of the Valkyrie. A— prototype. Alloy around the first through seventh ribs. The spine enhanced. Bionically, I mean. Permanently. Obviously.” She stutters over the sentences then goes on with doubled resolve, defensive over some unnamed tension he had brought in with him, as if she knew what he’d say next, dreaded it like death incarnate.

 

He tries to understand. There are sirens going off between his ears, alarm bells and fire alarms.

 

“You did this to yourself?”

 

“I— made the schematics.”

 

“Were you injured? Paralyzed?”

 

He touches the metal coil that split her back, an honest accident, a slip of the mind. The flesh merges with metal like it came born that way, stitched clean and clear, the transition from natural to enhanced so seamless he cannot stop himself— that is, until she jerks against him, makes a noise that places guilt in his bloodstream. He moves away.

 

“I’m sorry,” he says, and she nods, a string pulled too tightly. She will snap, he thinks. Her face is an orchestra of pain sent down and suppressed, a war between control and calamity, a spark of blood at the corner of her mouth from where her teeth dug in. 

 

“It’s alright,” she tells him, careful with the syllables, fingers tearing into the cot below her. 

 

“I shouldn’t have… I overstepped. Please, Amari would be better at— better with—”

 

_“This has nothing to do with Ana.”_

 

He balks. Lets go of her shirt, though it snags on the metal spine and stays open, the wound exposed, bruises breathing. It is the first time he has heard her raise her voice, and it is frightening in a way nothing else has ever been— like arriving the bottom of something that was supposed to go on forever— like reaching out to touch a flower, only to find it made of foil. 

 

She is breathing hard. She presses her lips into the back of her hand, the bags under her eyes a shade darker, her hair collapsing into wisps around her face. 

 

“Sorry.” This time it is her saying it, tone tempered back. Everything about her goes blurry and stretched, her defenses shattered, resolution slipping. She is younger, suddenly. Skin and bones. “I’m sorry.”

 

Genji does not move, suddenly wishing he had left the visor on, that he did not need to dedicate such effort to keeping himself in-line, effortless. He eyes the spot next to her, dares to wonder. Above them, the AC rattles. Outside it is still and silent. 

 

The cot shifts as he lowers himself, keeping a sliver of space between them, a healthy vacancy. She eyes him wearily, does not protest. His metal hands come together, fold neatly, squeeze until the pressure becomes an anchor and he can think clearly again. 

 

“Do not apologize.”

 

They sit. They sit until Ziegler breathes deeply once more, until Genji feels the scarred tissue of his face unhook, relax. The clock ticks on. They do not speak for what feels like a modest eternity, staring at the wall of cabinets and bottled antiseptics, her arms crossed at her chest and his motionless at his lap, the silence settled between them.

 

The cot creak as she leans forward, holds her face in her hands.

 

“I was not injured— that’s not why I did it.” The words are muffled. Though she had pulled down her shirt and coat, Genji instinctively eyes the space where her mechanical spine sat hidden under the fabric, pressed up and folding against the material. “It was for efficiency, so I could withstand the strain of the Valkyrie. Especially the older model. That and the healing properties; I was the first to undergo that treatment, so I could work out the kinks before introducing it to patients. Years ago. When the restrictions on that sort of thing were— tighter.”

 

She rubs under one eye. He listens, processes, begins to understand that what the doctor was describing was self-experimentation for the sake of knowledge— for that wild and restless look she carried when she was hot on the heels of a breakthrough, that savage disregard for herself and that ruthless ambition for improvement. She had not been able to test nanites on volunteers, so she did it to herself. That must have been years ago, before he even knew her. When Overwatch was growing strong and she was younger and the responsibility to be the best like a blade against the throat.

 

“You did it against regulations?” he asks, and she tilts her head slightly, views him in her peripherals.

 

“It was a blurred line. I’m sure the suits knew, the higher-ups, the ones even Jack had to listen to. They didn’t try to stop me. They understood the risks.”

 

“Did Morrison know, then?”

 

She closes her mouth. A ringing starts in his ears.

 

He waits, understands, feels something smooth and cold settle in his stomach as the silence stretched on. “Did the team?”

 

“Jesse did,” she says, quickly, like somehow that would save her. “The rest found out when it was relevant. When the nanites were regulatory, even required for some ops. It didn’t matter, then.”

 

_When it was relevant._ He wonders if that meant months or years; wonders when the rest had realized she had dipped her hands into heaven and dragged out a fragment of immortality, of godhood, that she had prepped and packaged in plastic syringes.

 

“I see.”

 

She turns herself an inch further, until he can see the ache there in her eyes. “I’m sure you find it revolting. The idea of being bionic without necessity.”

 

“I…” he leans back, touches the metal of his chest, a soft ting of chrome and carbon fiber. It is not a singular emotion he feels beneath the surface. It is riptides and rolling hills, a mix of empathy and anger that diffuses against each other until there is nearly nothing, the cool footprint of sentiment. He doesn’t know what to think. How to feel. 

 

“I do not find it revolting. Nor you. I would not choose it, but I lack the footing to judge.” He is being dry, analytical, using logic instead of emotion. It is all he can stand, now. All he and his vulnerability can manage. “I believe we walk different paths, Doctor.”

 

She holds his stare, her arms dropping to her middle, eyes gentle and thinking. Their shadows mingle on the floor, their feet hanging above them. 

 

“I hope so, Genji,” she whispers, keeping a hand on the bunk, bad arm tangled in the folds of her coat. Her shadow moves as she turns from him, slides herself from the cot, exhales quietly as her weight shifts and her back straightens. She moves no further, and he knows, somehow, that she can’t.

 

“Why are you keeping this from Amari?” he asks, not unkindly. He is finished with subtext. He is ready to reach some form of conclusion, even collusion, argument— something besides this back and forth.

 

She shakes her head, looks at something outside the window. “I am not her responsibility. It is hardly an injury to begin with—”

 

“Then take a step forward.”

 

She hesitates, a hand still set on the bunk. It is a long moment before she lifts one leg, teeters like someone courting balance for the first time, then quickly steps back, a curse falling from her lips. There are tears in her eyes. She blinks them away in a hurry.

 

Genji waits, watches as, slowly, she relinquishes power, leans hard against the cot.

 

“Sit down,” he tells her.

 

She does. 

 

“Amari,” he begins, “is a medical officer. It is her direct responsibility to oversee the physical stability of those around her— even you.” 

 

Again, his tone is clean, close-cut. He wants this simple. Wants this fixed.

 

“That’s _my_ job, actually,” she responds in turn, breathy and dazed. She tries to laugh, but it’s wrong, the sound snagging in her throat and dying shortly after. 

 

He does not feed that fire, instead takes the visor he had set aside into his hands, runs a finger over the seams. The options set before him are numerous, but the outcomes, he suspects, are not.

 

“McCree was here,” he states, and she shrinks, as if the words had the ability to burn her. “He would want to know if you were hurt.”

 

That lands on a sore spot for her. She rears up best she could, faces him with frayed beginnings of indignation. “What is your obsession with this?” she asked, perhaps trying for anger, but falling instead into desperation; dampened fury. 

 

“My obsession?” he refutes, tasting disbelief, voice hard like sterling silver. He knows what she means, is asking himself the same question, but it’s too late to turn back now. The path is laid. He walks it half-blind. “I am not the one hiding away and pretending to be fine whilst not being able to _stand.”_

 

It is venom and metallic chords and something raw and real and honest. A pressure throbs inside his chest. He breathes out and feels the air slide between his teeth.

 

“You don’t understand,” demands the doctor, and he shakes his head, something restless inside his skin. 

 

“This is from an assignment? When?” he asks, motioning with a nod to her back. “Alpha team was in the entire week— so was Beta. Morrison had a press conference. Reyes was talking up a storm.”

 

She bites at the inside of her cheek, eyes moving from place to place, face set carefully, tone clinical. “You don’t understand,” she says again, as if that made this okay, as if now he could leave and she could stay and life could revert to what it used to be—seeing each other only when it was only him sitting here, cold and condemned to the mercy of small, skilled hands, the control hers and hers alone.

 

Perhaps this was a first, thinks Genji. This role reversal. Maybe here, in the room, the power was always hers— all the strings at her fingers— all the hurt someone else’s. His head is spinning; this is too much. Too abstract. Fragments of impulsion and ideals and indiscretions. What was he _doing here?_

 

“Tell me, then.” He should have asked far before this; before anything else, even. The realization is cold water down his neck, and he is quick with the words, ready to amend, to understand. “How did this happen? With who? Where?”

 

The doctor takes the questions in and brews them between her ears, careful now, as if walking on glass. Her eyes move in small, rapid angles, then settle, sunk somewhere far away, hooked into a place he could not reach. She is distant. So practiced and blank.

 

“I was with Omega Team,” she says. Genji feels himself come together and tighten. “They needed a medic to fill. I offered my assistance.”

 

_Omega Team._

 

There is the smell of something burning. The texture of ash on his tongue.

 

“You didn’t,” he says, because that is what is he needs to believe. She looks away further, and something inside him comes untangled, falls apart. “You _didn’t.”_

 

“I was on call. They were down a medic—”

 

“They are reckless. They are _boys.”_

 

And then gone is her apathy, her distance, her grace— she glares splinters of ice at the back wall, replies with sharpened urgency. “They are soldiers hardly younger than McCree— than _me_ — and to allow them onto the field without a trained medical officer would be irresponsible. Unethical.”

 

Genji feels himself stand, though there is nowhere to go. His knuckles itch. Between the cage of his ribs something comes loose and flutters downwards, and he does not understand the sudden impulsion to strike something— to move— to dispel the heat building between his shoulder blades. He is anxious. Firing off on all cylinders.

 

“What is unethical,” he begins, every word heavy and dragging, “is to place yourself into a team of people who you have not trained with. Who are unfamiliar with your priorities or methods. Who do not know how to _protect you.”_

 

“Don’t blame them,” she warns, turning her head further.

 

“What was the objective? An escort? A break-in?”

 

“It— no.”

 

“They left you alone.” It is not a question. He takes a step forward and then back, not knowing where to place the guilt, who to run down, how to make them regret this. He does not allow her to get a word in edgewise. The dots connect, and he can’t stand the picture.“They forgot to think. They forgot to _think_ , and you were injured, and they didn’t even tell us.”

 

Angela wears wrinkles between her brows, bags beneath her eyes. She moves her head in no clear direction. Speaks in a way that suggests she would give anything to have this conversation roadblocked, shut down.

 

“You were not there. You do not know. Nor should you pretend to.”

 

He stops, forces stillness down through his body, limb to limb. Inhale. Exhale. The sting of cold lights and the sound of someone passing in the halls.

 

“Then correct me.”

 

And, oh, she tries. The effort is written all over her. But there is something to be said for being kicked while you're down, for being pushed too hard for too long with too little to show for it. He watches as she shrinks deeper into herself, slim arms wrapped around her waist

 

“They were occupied,” she says quietly, and Genji seethes beneath the surface. “It was a bomb job. Civilians everywhere. Children in the street.”

 

“That is no excuse.”

 

“I lingered behind— it’s no fault but my own. I thought there was someone alive beneath the rubble, and I stepped somewhere I shouldn’t, and the Valkyrie couldn’t handle the blast. Domestic terrorists left tripwires and barrel bombs, and I was careless. And that’s all.”

 

He is missing details, straining to fill the holes she left in the narrative. 

 

“When?” 

 

She stays flat. Clinical. Avoiding emotion like if she strayed too close, it would lash out, retaliate, wrap its thin fingers around her throat and squeeze.

 

“The day before last. I was only gone twenty hours— it was a sweep job; clear the area, evacuate innocents, remove any explosives the so-called _freedom fighters_ left behind. The people there were terrified. Many required medical attention.” Now, she stops, looks down at her lap and slowly uncurls a single hand there, her promise finger still stained red. “I should have stayed for them. But I had lost conciseness after the blast. It sent me straight through the drywall, and I woke up on the first dropship home, an IV in my arm and too many drugs in my system.”

 

She shrugs and tries to stifle the wince that follows. Genji aches in places he forgot could feel, plays for logic instead of anything else, an outlet for the anger, a buffer for the pain. 

 

“You should have stayed,” he says, as if it would help. His hands come up as he talks, motion back and forth, mechanical spindles flexing behind his knuckles. “You should have had an IEDD go in with you. A _technician_. Someone whose responsibility is to —”

 

“I am aware of my shortcomings,” she says, quickly regarding him in her peripherals, eyes glazed and unimpressed. “Thank you.”

 

He stops. Feels as the seconds go by and his arms lower, the muscles of his jaw slowly going slack, guilt settling in deep and hard. He is bad at this. Clumsy with his words and their tone and how they sound bouncing off the white walls of this room, loud and then quiet, accepting and then accusing. It should not be him here, he knows. He knows.

 

_(But it is.)_

 

Forcing a softness into his voice, he settles back down next to her, slowly tempers himself back, new to this, weary to make a fool of himself.

 

“I’m sorry,” he says, closer now, smelling her shampoo and coffee. His visor sits mere inches away, but despite the sudden urge, he does not reach for it. “I… It is difficult to say what I mean.”

 

She does not reply. They stare at the cabinets and specks of leftover glass sparkling on the floor, waiting for each other to speak, for the words to come and make this feel like a victory, an end that was both deserved and welcomed. But maybe that sort of ending did not exist for people like them, in a place like this. Maybe you could only have one or the other. 

 

Minutes into this pause, something small and wet hits the canvas of the cot. Genji looks down, finds a tiny halo of droplets splattered between them, translucent and already drying. A heartbeat drums in his ears. He goes still, listens as the doctor pushes a hand into her eyes, a chill traveling through him as he realized that there were tears leaking from between her fingers— that she was caving into herself, losing touch with composure— that she was turned so slightly away from him, ashamed, unable to hold up the walls any longer— that she, Angela Ziegler M.D., Head of Medical at age twenty-two, surgeon extraordinaire and resident miracle worker— was crying. 

 

A crack in his conciseness forms. He stares, shudders as a rush of heat and frenzy moves through him.

 

(Her coat hangs from her elbows, her blouse crooked over her shoulders, the nape of her neck bare and exposed. She is someone else. A girl swallowed by this room, unable to handle the weight of it, suddenly so much smaller— an imprint of the woman that sat before him only hours ago, that wise and wicked marble statue— some stranger he suddenly does not know how to console. She is a slowly-tearing-itself-apart cloud. A star sucked into itself, drifting surly towards a singularity. She is the echo of godhood, the tarnished impression of something he always thought to be untouchable, the word _ruin_ playing back and forth between his ears like music. How he could forget. How could he not _see_ this. How could he believe anything else.)

 

She is quiet with her words, not allowing them to go molten as the tears dripped from her chin. “You aren’t wrong to condemn me, Genji. I would do the same.”

 

(This was _her_ shell. Her own self-made prison. The idea that she was not someone who could crumble— that she could carry it all herself, keep them believing she was more than she was. A girl with too much to gain and not enough to lose. A doctor who could not save everyone.)

 

He reaches for her, arm moving on its own accord, something in his chest withering when she flinched away. He doesn’t know how to do this. He is cold and hard. Made for war, not for weeping. But he needs to believe otherwise; needs to know there is something still inside of him that was human, that could break, that could be reduced to skin and bone and salt, ashes, embers. He wanted to know there was something in him that could still be damaged. That could still bleed. 

 

(That could still grow back.)

 

“You are not worthy of condemnation, Angela,” promised the man made of metal, and flesh, and miracles. It was the first time he called her by that name. The taste of it lingered in his mouth.

 

She shakes her head, and he reaches for her again, touches her on the shoulder that was not stiffened and bruised to hell. It hurts him when she goes still. Like she wasn’t certain if he would pull her in or push her away. 

 

“You don’t know that,” she whispers, staring at him over her hands. 

 

“I do. Perhaps better than most.” 

 

The woman trembles beneath his fingers, and slowly, giving her ample time to resist, Genji guides her forward, closer, shrinking the space between them. She is limp and pliable. Her side touches his, so much warmer than the plates of carbon fiber and chrome, keeping herself silent, sealed shut. The warm droplets fall onto his chest plate, the sound of drizzle on a tin roof. 

 

“Stop,” she says, so quiet he knows she does not mean it. 

 

His hold is light, a single hand on the sleeve of her shirt, one finger brushing over her skin like his mother used to do when he had nightmares. There is a blurred flash of her face, dug deep from of his memories, dark hair and soft, curving eyes. She is the one who taught him the sword. How to make tea that tasted of jasper and citrus.

 

“I can,” he acknowledged, feeling her lean harder. “If you’d like.”

 

She stiffens. Then comes loose.

 

“You hate me,” she says, like it was common knowledge. The sobs start in earnest, but she presses them down, chokes on the intakes. “Because I— they told me to save you. They told me to _save_ you, and of course I— I didn’t stop and think, because why would I? Did it matter how you lived with yourself after, as long as you _lived?_ No. I dug in and fixed the parts I could and replaced the parts I couldn’t, like you were some _challenge_ , because they— because I didn’t remember to think past what I _could_ do, and remember what I should. So I broke it. I broke everything, and— and they told me to _save_ you—”

 

This is not how he imagined they’d come to speak of this. Honestly, deep down, he doubted they ever would. But never in this manner; her folded into herself and spewing regrets, him watching from up close, feeling as the tremors tore through her.

 

“I don’t hate you,” he said, at first with a thin tone, flimsy against the sound of her trying to breathe. Despite this— damn it, despite it all— a part of him was reluctant to relieve her of everything, to forgive so plainly, to make this so simple. But he finds himself saying it again, stronger this time, loud against the silence. “I don’t hate you. Even when I wanted to, I couldn’t.”

 

Angela swallows, swipes at her eyes. “You don’t have to lie.”

 

“I am not.”

 

“How?”

 

He doesn’t know. He can’t say. But he knows he believes it now, that he _has_ to believe it, has to trust that forgiveness cannot be earned, only given— you cannot un-break flower pots, cannot swallow back the words, cannot go back in time, stare into the face of your brother and convince him to put down the blade. You cannot expect that of someone. You can only place yourself in their shoes, wonder if you yourself have managed any better.

 

“We don’t often get what we deserve,” he says. “That is not always an unfortunate thing.”

 

She is lent up beside him, sharing her weight, hands lowered to her lap and curled halfway into fists. Her mouth opens and then closes. He can feel her ribs throb against his as she tries to send the sobs back down her throat, wincing as the motion made her spine jolt, the bruises and the small, crescent-shaped exit wounds aching in protest, her face a pendulum swinging between tight and trembling.

 

“But I know,” Genji adds, feeling the hand on her go still, sensing her stiffen as the tone turned and hardened, “that you did not deserve to be dragged along with a team that did not care for you.”

 

“Genji,” she starts, but he does not yield.

 

“You do not deserve to be in pain because there were times you could have done better. You do not deserve to be in pain because McCree is missing an arm, or because Ana an eye, or because they gave you the go-ahead and told you to keep me alive. Which, I know, I could have been kinder about.”

 

“It’s not about them,” she says quickly, not looking at him.

 

“It is,” he clarifies, hearing his voice raise. “It is, and I don’t understand it. There is no need to punish yourself for something you had no control over. You are not guilty. You can take breaks for this— from us.”

 

She pulls away, and he lets her, removing his hand from her frame but keeping it raised and close by. There is an anger in her eyes, but the longer he stares, the weaker the emotion becomes— he watches with weary awe as the facade cracks, breaks, reveals a bitter melancholy underside.

 

“There are things that are expected of me,” she says in a lukewarm fashion, withdrawn from him, like she was afraid of the closeness. “Things I did not count on when I came here. I wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to heal, to create, to improve. But then, suddenly, I did it all too well— I went too far, too fast, too blindly. I brought people back that should have stayed gone, people that looked up at me like I was God, and when they walked away, I realized I could not follow them back over the line I had crossed.”

 

She hesitates, now. He can see the struggle playing on her face, the narrowed eyes and tightly pulled lips. “Somedays, I wish I could. It’s selfish. But when you play savior, you're are expected to save everyone.”

 

The collar of her shirt pulls as she tries to readjust her weight, and the bruises stare back at him. She holds her ribs, breathes out hard and fast.

 

“How do I save everyone, Genji?”

 

He knows the answer. It’s what neither of them wants to hear. But he says it anyways, clear and crisp against the white noise, so she can hear it from someone besides her own reflection; can be relieved of the weight he helped put on her shoulders.

 

“You don’t.”

 

A ripple moves through her body, head to toe. “I _have_ to—“

 

“You don’t.”

 

“They need me to.”

 

“If that is what they convinced you, then they are fools, and cowards. You cannot hand someone the world and expect them to keep it up. Not by themselves. Not forever.”

 

“We are not Atlas, Angela.”

 

She doesn’t want to listen to him anymore. That much is obvious. But her resolve has slipped and her pain has turned her malleable, debased and mixed, two-parts exhaustion, two-parts guilt. She bends forward. A scab has ripped and stained through her blouse, droplets of yellow and red sinking into the white.

 

“I don’t know,” she whispers between her fingers, no longer looking for a response, an answer, a staying hand. He waits, weighs his reply, cannot arrive at one fast enough. 

 

“Tell me what to do,” Angela says, quiet like a prayer, and he knows without her telling him that she has arrived, finally, at a breaking point. “I can’t— I can’t think. I can’t figure it out. Something’s wrong with me; the nanites must be transmitting interference. I should write this down. The others could be prone. But— my hands are— shaking.”

 

_(Help me)._

 

He is standing before he even processes the motion, sending her deeper into herself, blue eyes struggling to focus. Life thuds on the undersides of his wrists. With an ease he finds surprising, he brushes a pair of fingers against her knuckles, musters a tone that is both soft and direct, calm and capable. 

 

“Do you trust me?”

 

She opens her mouth, staring at where they met. An exhale creeps up from her lungs, long and suffering, and as she slides her eyes close, he is convinced of her answer, waits poised and patient for her _no_. Will he blame her when it comes? Could he expect her trust, if it were the other way around? He isn’t sure. The lights are too bright; the silence too deafening.

 

“Yes.”

 

It’s all he can hear for the next few moments. The air flowing through the vents above them goes quiet, the world outside dies, the clock on the wall pauses to stand still. 

 

And then he is moving, turning away from her with a single parting nod, heading forward through the threshold and out into the uncertainty of the hall, clear-headed and adamant,  forgetting his mask on the way out.

 

* * *

 

The door is grey and cold, and slides open immediately when he knocks. A woman with a tattoo balances on the threshold, taller than him, all bronzed skinned and sharp eyed. She smells of bullet casings, the desert breeze. Her gaze lingers on his face, holds the scars and the mangled skin delicately in the dark drops of her vision, regarding them one by one. It is her first time seeing him like this. He suspects it will not be the last.

 

“Shimada,” she begins, professional as always, feet bare, the room behind her dark. There is a stiffness in her tone, cold like early mornings and gunmetal. “It’s been awhile.”

 

It has. He did not consider this, hopes it will not work against him in the coming moments.

 

“Captain Amari,” he greets, suddenly slowed down, dipping his head in greeting. His lungs ache. He must remember to breathe. “I’m sorry to wake you.”

 

She watches him without saying a word, her gaze knowing and edge-like, even without both eyes. Before he can manage to put his thoughts into some semblance of order, she steps forward, out over the doorframe, unconcerned as it shut behind her. She no longer looks at his face— no longer gives a damn about the scars.

 

“What’s wrong?” 

 

And, oh, if there were time—

 

Instead he nods down the hall. She turns and stares into the darkness interrupted by intervals, a tile floor that was always cold against the soles.

 

“Please. Follow me.”

 

He does not need to ask twice.

 

* * *

 

Genji is there when the lab door opens nearly an hour later. Amari emerges with the remnants of a med kid and bags beneath her eyes, the lights dimmed behind her, the air quiet and soothed.

 

He is told she will be fine. He is told that she is sleeping.

 

Amari hesitates, then, never one to speak without first dissecting the words. There was always an age attached to her, a sense of maturity, rust. But with it came a calmness. A warmth.

 

“You did good.”

 

He says nothing in reply, and she nods, leaves him at the open door. He does not enter. He hears the soft exhales, can see a lump under a pair of blankets atop the cot, and that is enough.

 

She is fine. She is sleeping. 

 

(Finally).

 

* * *

 

That morning, Genji finds a man by the name of Nick Cunningham and blackens both of his eyes. That afternoon, Reyes gives him two weeks probation. But after, in a low, boyish tone, he informs Genji that Cunningham had decided to resign— that Omega Team was officially down a commander.

 

“Pity,” says Genji, returning to his blade and whetstone.

 

“Indeed,” grins Gabe.

 

* * *

 

That night, he returns. The lab lights are off and the room itself is empty. He enters anyway, putting away his disappointment, and finds his mask right where he left it, atop her cot, beside the window.

 

Beneath it is a note.

 

He picks it up. Undoes the creases. Holds it high against the moonlight so that the handwritten scrawl could shine through. The words are inked with neat cursive, only slightly crooked, written small and starting with his name.

 

And for the first time in a long time, Genji feels himself smile.

**Author's Note:**

> if you enjoyed this work, please do drop me a line.
> 
> i honestly don't know when / if i'll be updating any of my previous work- i'm really running out of steam for some of that stuff. sorry if that disappoints some people, but college is just down the road, and that's taking a lot out of me.
> 
> but thank you to those who have stuck with me this far! i really do adore this site and all of you who continuously make it so positive and encouraging. i doubt that will ever change :)
> 
> as always, cheers.


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